How does a marketing team even evaluate these SEO tasks and put ROI to them, let alone arrive at an SEO budget that makes sense.

Here are five strategies to arrive at a logical SEO budget, starting with the simplest, and finishing with the most sophisticated.

1) Base on Overall (Digital) Marketing Budget

It’s really hard to know what your overall marketing budget should be, let alone digital, let alone SEO. There are full blog posts, books and courses dedicated to that, but in summary, these are common approaches to finding a marketing budget:

Flat rate dollar approach – based on what you can afford (least difficult, least accurate)

Percentage of sales – popular method, usually 9-12% of annual budget (less difficult, more accurate)

Match competitor – base budget on what competitors are spending to keep up (less accurate, more difficult)

Marketing plan objective – budget aligns with objectives, though most logical by most (more difficult, more accurate)

So however you arrive at your marketing budget overall, you’ll allocate a portion to traditional marketing (offline) and a portion to digital.

Breaking down digital further you may allocate by overhead costs such as marketing team salaries, tools, and the marketing website. Then it makes sense to divide up the dollars by which channels drive the most traffic and revenue to your site, either what the present breakdown is, or what the ideal should be based on your industry standards.

For instance, if email is driving 50% of your traffic to your site, but organic is just 10%, that’s likely an imbalance compared to most industry averages, where organic is 50% of traffic and email is closer to 20%. Based on this, you would allocate more money to SEO to get it to the industry average.

Conversely, if you are happy with your current traffic channel distributions, let’s say it’s:

40% organic search (SEO)

20% paid search (Google Ads)

10% social media (paid + organic)

10% email

10% display ads

10% referral traffic

Then you would allocate your budget according to this breakdown.

Every company and industry is different, so take the time to research and plan a strategy based on this.

2) Base on your Paid Search Spend

Paid search, also known as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the easiest comparison with SEO, especially Google AdWords, since the user will either click an AdWords ad or organic listing. Similar comparisons can be made against Facebook Ads, but here we’ll focus on Google AdWords (now Google Ads) PPC.

Let’s say you’re currently spending $10,000 a month on Google AdWords, and nothing on SEO. Well, with 80% of clicks in your average SERP, it wouldn’t be a far cry to say your SEO budget should be 4x your PPC budget.

But let’s get even more conservative. At a minimum, you should be spending at least 50% of what you’re spending on your PPC budget. A more “best practice” benchmark would be matching 100% of your PPC budget.

In my perspective (and most SEOs) it’s insanity to spend an overweighted amount on PPC with a disproportionately small SEO budget.

I was working with a client that was spending $14,000 a month on Google AdWords, with a very unoptimized campaign – literally sending Google free money – and was reluctant pay more than 15% of that on monthly SEO work. While in some industries this may make sense, it was not a sound strategy.

PPC is great and I love how measurable it is, but SEO is a more permanent long-term strategy, and should at least be matching what the PPC spend is.

Certain industries should be spending more or less on SEO vs PPC, here are some quick examples:

Where to spend more on SEO:

In some mature industries, like insurance, mortgage, loans, and other financial categories, cost-per-click can be as high as $60-$100 per click – in these industries it makes a lot of sense to spend more on SEO

When to spend more on PPC:

If you’re a funded startup trying to find product market fit, and you have a boatload of cash, it makes sense to test the market with more PPC dollars than SEO, as you may be pivoting product and industries in few months, so you’re not yet ready for long term investment

All too often, we as SEOs do a poor job communicating the ROI of SEO compared to PPC. We talk more about traffic when we should talk more about revenue and conversions.

3) Base on Real Competitors’ Organic Search Value

Let’s say you’re the 20th most popular direct-to-consumer (DTC) mattress company in the market. You’ve got a long way to go to the top, and don’t have the war chest that Casper or Leesa have.

Knowing the value of a competitor’s organic traffic – let’s say $100k a month – you can compare it against your own – $50k a month for example, and decide how much you want to invest to catch up with your competitor, and how long you want to wait before you get there.

One simple way to estimate organic search value is to use competitive research tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush or SearchMetrics to estimate the organic value of competitor’s websites.

What the organic traffic value is derived from:

Estimated organic traffic keyword by keyword, based on keyword rankings and volume of each keyword

The cost-per-click (CPC) of each of those keywords

Multiply those together and you have a $ value – this says if you were to buy all of this organic traffic via Google AdWords, how much would it cost per month?

Probably the most accurate way we have so far to but a $ value on competitors websites, without knowing their internal conversion rates and numbers

Going further, you can get tactical on a page level.

This very strategic tactic – Moneyball SEO – entails picking off pages that your competitors have that are high in organic value and low in difficulty. Difficulty is measured by both the keyword difficulty (KD) of the keywords that page is ranking for and also the page authority (PA – a Moz metric) or URL rating (UR – an Ahrefs metric).

This approach is very intelligent, and works wonders. Probably the most under-appreciated SEO strategy. (Perhaps those that use it don’t talk about it.)

4) Laser Focus on your most Important Revenue Driving Pages

Let’s be honest – it’s hard to get backlinks to revenue generating pages, such as ecommerce product pages or lead generation pages, which is why one of the most common SEO strategies is to do content marketing and lift the site as a whole.

But if you as the marketing manager know your most important revenue driving pages, and can present these as the ultimate goal to raise organic traffic for, you’re much more advanced than most.

Let’s say you have sell your own watch brand online and you have 5 top-selling product pages that do well in paid search and paid ads, but have limited organic traffic. What you would plan your SEO budget around is what the outcome would be to drive significant organic traffic to these 5 pages.

The SEO strategy would be build around these 5 pages and everything would be measured against the 12-month success of these pages.

The SEO plan would involve creating content and getting links around and directly to these 5 pages – so both direct and indirect SEO – but with everything laser focused on these pages, the plan is very focused, and very measurable.

Planning an budget and strategy around “doing SEO for my whole site” means attention and resources being spread through among dozens or hundreds of pages, which means success is difficult to measure except by the very long term.

The holy grail of marketing is CLTV and CAC, yet why do so few marketers have these tattooed on their brains?

It’s difficult to get to that point, but magical when you do.

If every customer that fills out your lead gen form for auto insurance is worth $4,500 while a customer (CLTV = $4,500) and out of every 100 visitors to a page, 1 ends up becoming a paying customer, then each visit is worth $45.

See how much clarity that brings to things?

If the page has 10,000 visitors a month currently, then the page is worth $450,000 a month. If an SEO strategy can bring an additional 10% organic traffic to the page, that’s a bump of 1,000 visitors, and +$45,000 a month in organic traffic value.

Let’s say an SEO campaign to bring in that 10% increase has a lasting effect of 2 years (before competition catches up again). To break even on your SEO spend, you could pay $1,080,000 for that campaign and break even on revenue. With a profit margin of 30% for each additional customer (common in insurance), you could pay $324,000 for that SEO campaign and break even on profit.

If an SEO company puts together a campaign budget of 20% of that, or roughly $64,000 – you should immediately say yes.

And this is just for one page.

Granted, this is an ideal scenario in an industry with very high CLTV and healthy profit margins, but there are industries with even higher CLTVs and profit, such as mature or high growth SaaS companies.

Knowing your CLTV can help you appropriately understand if a proposed organic search budget is reasonable, or way off.

This is the most sophisticated approach. If you can bring these numbers to your SEO consultancy, you’ll have a much better strategy and partnership.

Conclusion

It’s tough to build the optimal marketing budget, tough to build a great digital budget, and challenging to nail down the most appropriate SEO budget for both cash flow and growth.

Too often, both the client and SEO will pick a number that doesn’t have a lot of risk, but this may be seriously hindering growth.

]]>https://www.greenflagdigital.com/seo-budgets/feed/0A 10-Point Guide to SEO Website Relaunches for Marketing Teamshttps://www.greenflagdigital.com/10-point-guide-seo-website-relaunches-marketing-teams/
https://www.greenflagdigital.com/10-point-guide-seo-website-relaunches-marketing-teams/#respondFri, 26 Jan 2018 22:58:57 +0000https://www.greenflagdigital.com/?p=1817Relaunching a website is scary. A lot can go wrong. The SEO and organic traffic portion of a website relaunch is often the scariest for the marketing department. There’s a lot to do, and not a lot of clarity on how to do it. Are you a director of marketing or online marketing manager tasked […]

The SEO and organic traffic portion of a website relaunch is often the scariest for the marketing department. There’s a lot to do, and not a lot of clarity on how to do it.

Are you a director of marketing or online marketing manager tasked with this challenge?

Here are my top 10 pointers for you on how to approach these projects, written by an SEO that was one a full-time director of marketing (I know the struggle).

1. Know Your Numbers and Your Goals

Before your first conversation with the SEO team or consultant, you need to know your top-level numbers and goals for this project.

These are the most common and helpful questions to answer for the SEO team:

Why are you relaunching the website?

Common reasons are branding, company name change, websites merging, brand consolidation, redesign, replatforming, among others.

What percent of website traffic currently comes from organic search?

This impacts the preparation phase and the depth of an initial SEO audit

What do you hope to accomplish organically with this project?

Some teams want to minimize traffic loss

Some are hoping for a traffic boost (not always realistic)

Some are ok with losing traffic on some properties, but need to protect others

Knowing your numbers and goals helps the SEO get a picture of how critical the project is for your site. If your site only gets 5% of traffic from search, that’s a lot different from a site getting 90% of traffic from search, and will impact recommendations and planning.

2. Define Top Priority Goals for the Site

With more teams and people come more opinions.

What often happens with website relaunches and redesigns is that the designers have one opinion, the UX team another, the development team a third, and on and on for marketing, content, SEO, PPC, CRO, etc.

Is your relaunch’s #1 goal to make a prettier site? A faster site? A site that earns more organic traffic? There are multiple goals but they should be clearly prioritized.

When you as a marketing manager have to make a decision when SEO and design are on opposite sides of the table, which goal do you prioritize?

3. SEO Relaunches are an Art and a Science

There’s a lot of technical SEO elements that are part of a website relaunch.

Redirects, canonicals, sitemaps, the list goes on.

There are some critical elements that are part of any SEO relaunch project that can cripple your site. There are also dozens of nuances that are small on their own, but add up to be significant.

The science part is ensuring all the technical SEO aspects are perfectly aligned.

Then comes the art part. If you’re making content changes during a relaunch, it’ll take some human decision making to decide what stays, what goes, what merges, and what gets prioritized (backed by data of course).

Likewise, when changing the architecture of your site, there are best practices to a degree, but also your own perception on what makes sense and what doesn’t.

4. A Lot Can Go Wrong

As shown in the recent post on SEO relaunch case studies, seemingly minor things can make your site sink like a rock post-launch.

Just one misconfiguration of one critical element – such as the robots.txt, noindex tags, or rel=canonical elements – can tank your site for weeks until detected.

It’s unfair.

It shouldn’t be the case that so much can go wrong in organic search from so little, but it’s the way things are.

Sometimes Google will give you the benefit of the doubt, or ignore some directives, but some are absolute.

A good way to value how much this project is worth to you is to multiple the revenue from organic traffic for anywhere from 9 days to 6 weeks by 30%. The resulting number is a good ballpark figure for how much you could lose from a failed project. I put together a quick lost revenue calculator here to see for yourself.

5. Preparation is Everything

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” – Benjamin Franklin

Good ole’ Ben said it best, hundreds of years before the first website.

With so many teams, ideas, and tasks happening at the same time, preparation is everything.

Look, with such a big project, a lot is on the line.

It’s a lot more than “lining up redirects and making sure the content stays the same” as some people might flippantly reply on Twitter.

So get out those spreadsheets, those Asana boards, those checklists, and strap in for a fun ride!

6. Create a General Timeline Based on Needs

Having a timeline is critical.

The SEO team should be engaged 30-60 days out for small sites, and 6 months to a year out for large sites.

As with many website development and digital marketing projects, things get moved all the time because the nature of the project is so ethereal. We’re not building cathedrals here. Just digital ones.

If your timeline is for a 4-month project and it gets delayed repeatedly throughout the process, your SEO team may be unavailable or have to charge more for the extra delays, so make the plan as concrete as possible, and based on real needs.

7. Share Everything Between Teams

It can be annoying to loop in all the teams on email in every conversation, but with task management systems like Asana or communication platforms like Slack, your teams can have visibility in what the others are discussing.

This is pretty powerful.

As one example, my SEO team only got wind of a product page redesign that UX and design had agreed upon weeks after it was decided. But they left out key modules on the page that would impact SEO. They had to make design adjustments, which delayed the project an extra week.

Like everything in business and life, communicate early and often.

8. Involve Teams as Early as Possible

Similar to above, it’s key to involve all the critical teams as early as possible in the project.

If a large site is relaunching in two weeks, that’s not the time to invite the SEO team to review the project before launch.

That’s asking for disaster.

A lot of projects overlap between teams, and there are tons of dependencies. Make sure that everyone knows what’s happening if it even remotely affects their work.

It’s likely everyone involved is also working on their standard monthly projects in addition to this one-time project. So make sure everyone has enough time to prepare, and it’ll be happily ever after.

9. Share Analytics Information Ahead of Time

It’s good to safeguard your company’s private information, such as financial data and proprietary information.

It’s very unlikely that showing your analytics to an SEO before the contract is signed means the SEO will go give it to your competitor and they’ll make millions.

It’s more likely that there are lots of nuances that can’t be seen from 3rd party tools that can affect the whole project.

10. Keep the HiPPOs in the Loop

Are there executives and higher ups (HiPPOs – highest paid person in the office) on the sideline watching the project from afar?

They may only come out of the woodwork after the fact, with opinions when it’s too late.

If your executives are interested in the performance of the website, share updates with them for major changes.

Their opinions can derail the project when it’s too late. You know your internal politics and processes, but from my experience, there have been a few scenarios when the ultimate decision maker (CEO) got involved too late, and the teams had to scrambe.

Bonus: It Ain’t Over till it’s Over

After a website relaunch, you’re allowed to pop the champagne for 5 minutes before it’s time to get back to work.

The 2nd most important portion, besides the preparation phase, is the post-launch phase where we’re monitoring the traffic in real time.

Google search is a black box. All of our best practices are based on thousands of SEOs testing what works and what doesn’t. But there’s still so much that’s unknown.

What may work for one site perfectly may not for another.

So after a site launches it’s critical to be flexible and make the adjustments needed based on how organic rankings and traffic are flowing.

Once you start hitting some growth after a few months post-launch, then you can celebrate.

]]>https://www.greenflagdigital.com/10-point-guide-seo-website-relaunches-marketing-teams/feed/0What Does SERP Stand For?https://www.greenflagdigital.com/what-does-serp-stand-for/
https://www.greenflagdigital.com/what-does-serp-stand-for/#respondMon, 01 Jan 2018 19:58:31 +0000https://www.greenflagdigital.com/?p=1857Billions of people use Google search daily, but not many could tell you what the search results are called. What Does SERP Stand For? SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. When you do a Google search, this is the page that lists the results that you can click on. SERPs used to include just […]

]]>Billions of people use Google search daily, but not many could tell you what the search results are called.

What Does SERP Stand For?

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. When you do a Google search, this is the page that lists the results that you can click on.

SERPs used to include just ten blue links, but now they include universal search features to best answer the users search.

What Does a SERP Mean for SEO?

We’ve established that the SERP means Search Engine Results Page. What this means for the practices of search engine optimization is that we have to account for what features show up on a SERP for each keyword query.

Since Google established Universal Search, the SERPs have featured much more than just ten blue links. Search results now include images, videos, shopping ads, local search results and more recently featured snippets.

What are Featured Snippets?

Featured snippets are summaries that appear at the top of a Google SERP that answers the user’s query. They are programmatically extracted from a page that almost always is ranking in the top 10 of search results.

The summary is a snippet extracted programmatically from what a visitor sees on your web page. What’s different with a featured snippet is that it is enhanced to draw user attention on the results page. When we recognize that a query asks a question, we programmatically detect pages that answer the user’s question, and display a top result as a featured snippet in the search results.

]]>https://www.greenflagdigital.com/what-does-serp-stand-for/feed/0Decision Science for SEO: How to Plan SEO Tasks & Projectshttps://www.greenflagdigital.com/decision-science-seo-plan-seo-tasks-projects/
https://www.greenflagdigital.com/decision-science-seo-plan-seo-tasks-projects/#respondFri, 30 Jun 2017 19:03:42 +0000https://www.greenflagdigital.com/?p=1677What is the next best thing you should do for your website’s SEO to have the biggest impact? It’s a hard question. Are deciding based on a plan, or based on a whim? To try to answer the most simple way you can just repeat what is always the easiest answer: more content, more links. […]

]]>What is the next best thing you should do for your website’s SEO to have the biggest impact?

It’s a hard question.

Are deciding based on a plan, or based on a whim?

To try to answer the most simple way you can just repeat what is always the easiest answer: more content, more links.

But those are just the tip of the iceberg. Which content? Which links? What’s the process? Which first? By when? What topic? Who does it?

Trying to plan out projects, tasks, hypothesis, tests, analytics and everything in my SEO processes has been difficult because of two things:

So much data

So much opportunity

What makes SEO so great and so challenging is that there are unlimited options and a fuzzy sense of completion.

If you’re a designer and tasked with designing a book cover for a client, your job is pretty cut and dry. Yes you may need to spend tons of time researching, drafting, revising, etc. But the the end goal is concrete, defined, and often with a fixed deadline.

With SEO it’s way different. The ultimate goal is more traffic, revenue, and ROI for the website, but the due dates, goals, deliverables, components, etc are all very mushy.

In the best and biggest businesses, the company has quarterly revenue and marketing goals that have to be met. That’s set from the executive suite by the CEO, COO, or CMO. That then rolls down the hierarchy to the other layers of employees that execute. The VP of Marketing sets goals for their team. The Director of Marketing then sets goals for their team, and it flows all the way down to the SEO team or employee.

The best businesses map all this out into one huge rollup. Google calls it Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). Salesforce maps all goals up to the CEO. This is what to aim for in epic corporate goal planning.

But for small to mid-sized businesses, this sophistication may not be in place. Oftentimes, the SEO team is left to make their own decisions on timelines, inputs, outputs, goals, etc to lead. The business owner or executive team may be too busy to truly collaborate, or just trust the SEO team to “make traffic go up”, and that’s that.

So assuming the messiest situation in which the SEO team is left to make all the decisions, how can that happen?

Unlimited Data Tools, Not So Many Decision Tools

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed a lack of true decision making tools in SEO.

We have so much data: backlink tools, keyword research tools, rank tracking tools, all-in-one tools, content analysis tools, but a big piece of the puzzle missing is better decision making tools.

Essentially all we’re left with is our own spreadsheet templates that we have to make on our own and start from scratch.

So until someone creates this missing SEO tool – a true decision making tool – we have to roll our own.

Decision Science

One of the hardest classes I took as a business major in college was Decision ScienceDSCI 300. Every undergrad business major dreaded it. For entertainment, you can readstudent reviews of the class. My favorite one is “IF YOU TAKE THIS YOU WILL HATE YOUR LIFE AND REGRET IT DEARLY!”. Thankfully I was warned it was hard so prepared for the worst and ended up with an A, but that required 5 hours of study a day at some points.

The class was one of those classes that you wonder when you’ll ever use. It’s one of those classes that’s super useful, but 10 years later when you actually have decision making power at a company and can actually do something about it.

A definition of the course:

“Prescriptive business analytics focuses on helping decision makers solve complex business problems. Students develop skills necessary to define, analyze, and solve problems in all areas of business including operations, marketing, and finance. Students utilize spreadsheets to model, analyze, and develop solution alternatives for a variety of business problems. Among the tools students utilize are modeling, influence diagrams, decision trees, Monte Carlo simulation, optimization techniques, and sensitivity analysis.”

To me, that perfectly describes the process I’m currently looking for to make all of my SEO projects simpler, smarter, and more powerful. A unified system that pulls together all the inputs, data, tasks, projects, human capital, and ties it together to help make business decisions that are backed by data.

Decision Science vs Data Science

Data science is a hot new term and was called the sexiest job of the 21st century by Harvard Business Review back in 2010. But now that the excitement has leveled off on this new job, others are saying it’s not the only thing that matters.

Data scientists, as Dhingra explained, analyze data and then “translate and communicate insights to the senior management and key decision makers using information dashboards and visualization tools. But the efforts can become ineffectual if business users, for whom the insights have been generated, do not show equal fervor in consuming it.” This is where decision scientists are needed. “Consumption of analytics,” Dhingra explained, “is a recurrent and overarching process that includes the creation and communication of insights, its implementation and measurement, aligning incentives to endorse a data-driven decision making culture, and lastly the development of cognitive repairs to let facts rule the process.”

While data science is vital to data-driven decision making, Dhingra argued it is only half of the equation that decision science is needed to complete. “To fully harness the business benefits that data can offer,” Dhingra concluded, “organizations will need a complete ecosystem comprising the right integrated processes, technology and people with the right mindset and skills.”

The Decision Matrix

One of my favorite tools for organizing an deciding on projects to do is a decision matrix. I thought I invented it for my own use, but turns out the concept has been out for awhile.

I first produced on in Excel way back in 2012 and it really helped me focus on the most important tasks based on a variety of factors.

I’ve since moved on to Trello and then Asana (because everyone else used those) but I believe that was a mistake. I believe the decision matrix is better so I’ll be returning to it, at least for project prioritization and planning.

Essentially you’re laying out all the important factors that go into your decision. You want the right balance of simplicity and accuracy. For some projects that means just three variables, for others that means 30.

The application of this for SEO projects means taking into account everything you are deciding between and mapping it out in a grid. If you’re deciding at a super high level just what projects to do first, you would line up all the project possibilities and grade them.

The Rollup

How is everything connected in an organization. If you think about it, most companies are a hierarchy, and those at the top can’t meet their goals if everyone below them doesn’t contribute and hit there’s.

Rollups aren’t used enough in SEO.

There may be overall goals, but then what campaigns and projects rollup into those overall goals?

What daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly tasks need to happen to meet those goals?

Who does them? When do they do them? How much time do they spend on them?

A rollup shows the connection between everything and how everyone contributes to a higher goal.

General Decision Making Software that Could Work for SEO

Imagine if you mapped out all your potential SEO projects to look like this:

Ignore the actual labels, it’s more about the layout of total project score vs cost. This is called Value for Money.

1000 Minds makes decision making software that helps businesses across all industries make decisions based on their criteria.

They also have a simplified, consumer-level piece of software calledMeenyMo that can be used for problems like buying a car.

I see a lot of potential here for SEOs working software like this into their workflow after they’ve graduated from spreadsheets.

Where’s the Actionable Part of This?

I’m working on a decision science template for SEO projects, and hope to be able to share it with the SEO community. I’ll also try to produce a broader version that can apply to other industries and fields. (Perhaps even help you choose your next vacation.)

SEO is business analysis at it’s core. We inhale all the data, sort it, analyze it, and then make decisions on it.

]]>https://www.greenflagdigital.com/decision-science-seo-plan-seo-tasks-projects/feed/0WP Premium Support by Godaddy Review (Formerly WP Curve Review)https://www.greenflagdigital.com/wp-curve-wp-premium-support-godaddy-review/
https://www.greenflagdigital.com/wp-curve-wp-premium-support-godaddy-review/#commentsThu, 22 Jun 2017 20:09:52 +0000http://www.greenflagdigital.com/?p=610Important Update for 2018: WP Curve Was sold to GoDaddy and rebranded as WP Premium Support. After going through the transition from WP Curve to WP Premium Support by GoDaddy, I have to revise my review and I can no longer recommend this service at this point. I have added my most recent review of the […]

]]>Important Update for 2018: WP Curve Was sold to GoDaddy and rebranded as WP Premium Support. After going through the transition from WP Curve to WP Premium Support by GoDaddy, I have to revise my review and I can no longer recommend this service at this point. I have added my most recent review of the service first, and my original review can be seen below. I now recommend WP Buffs who I’ve been using for a few months and found their service the perfect replacement. Check them out here. Also see review at end of this article.

WP Premium Support by GoDaddy Review

WP Curve was an amazing service, as you can read below in my original review how much I valued it. It blew me away.

WP Curve was sold to GoDaddy, and I had high hopes that the quality would continue with the transition. GoDaddy has improved over the years and gone through a transition. It shed it’s elephant-killing founder ways and became a progressive company with a much better track record.

Unfortunately, my experience with the new WP Premium Support by GoDaddy has not been great. After a very confusing setup period, and a weird on-boarding I was met with no outreach from their team while they billed our account. We were previously on a proactive plan, and assumed the transition would have a similar setup as they assured us, but we received no communication from their team.

After finally requesting a task from their team, we were also met with silence. Only when I reached out to the product manager on Twitter did I finally get some sort of response. Yet over a week and a half later, I have not response.

I’ll be updating this review if things get better, but at this point I’ll be looking out for better WordPress support plans. I cannot recommend WP Premium Support by Godaddy.

Old WP Curve Review Below

This original review was published July 22, 2014.

I recently did a piece comparing WordPress maintenance companies and I’ve always been fascinated by the space. It’s only grown up in the last few years and a few companies have sprung up around it. I’m not sure about the statistics and growth about the industry, but it seems to be solving a very real problem out there. Many, many small business owners don’t know how to get help with their WordPress website and at the same time don’t have the time or funds to hire their own developers. They also don’t know who to trust. By building brands around their services, I feel that these companies are fulfilling a real gap in the industry that existed a few years ago.

It seems almost too good to be true – you get unlimited small tasks (under 30 minutes) in one month for $69/month per site. I’ve only been using this service for a few days, and so far I’m impressed.

It makes me feel powerful.

The way I work, and I’m sure many people do, is I set out to do a task and if I don’t 100% know how to do it, I have to research it. Upon research, however, I find myself going down the rabbit hole reading up and down a bunch of articles trying to find the perfect way to do something.

With WP Curve, I simply tell them what my problem is and they have the expertise of doing it hundreds of times that they just get it done.

In the long run I should learn all of what they’re doing on my own, but I have to prioritize what’s most important now. And learning everything they can do in five minutes would take me at least an hour to learn per task.

Although I’m a customer of theirs, I feel like they’re an employee of mine that I can outsource the work too that I don’t know how to do, I don’t have time to do, or I hate doing. More than anything though, is the fact that the more I can give them, the more I can focus on larger projects and tasks that I can’t give to anyone else.

Business Lessons Learned from WP Curve

In just a few days, a number of things that they are doing right have stood out to me:

1. Have a Strong Differentiator

There are several well-known WordPress maintenance companies and all of them are a bit different – which is good. WP Curve is more different though than the rest of them. If you were to plot them out on a chart they would be an outlier.

They do all the normal things that the other companies do – backups, security, plugin upgrades, but that’s not what they make prominent. What they make prominent is that they can do unlimited tasks for you per month.

None of the other major companies are offering anything like this currently, which means they virtually own that space.

2. Make an Irresistible Offer

They say if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. In this case, I would say the offer is getting close to the level of too good to be true, but logically with the right business efficiency plan and taking advantage of good developers internationally, I could see how the financials work out.

For me, and presumably many others, the idea of unlimited tasks in a month at the two prices they have listed ($69 & $99) is an irresistible offer.

If they can do just one task in 30 minutes that would have taken me an hour to research and implement, I’ve already saved money. Do this multiple times in a month and it’s impossible to say no.

They’ve also made their monthly subscription even more irresistible when you realize that you can get unlimited 30-minute tasks for $69 a month, or a one-time task for $69. Makes the subscription a no-brainer.

3. Solve Initial Problem Fast

I assume that, like me, business owners or their developers see these WordPress maintenance companies a few times before they finally act and make the purchase. I’ve been aware of these for probably two year but never had that final push to become a subscriber.

They one of the sites I maintain got hacked.

I didn’t really know what to do right off the bat and my time was ticking before I could potentially be blacklisted by Google. I know with certainty that I could have researched the problem and fixed it – but I also know that would have taken hours.

I pulled the trigger on WP Curve and hopped on their Olark chat and their developer fixed the problem exactly within seven minutes.

I was amazed at how fast it happened.

The business lesson here is that I came with a major problem and they addressed that right away. Everything else can be fixed in due time, but that was urgent.

4. Get Your Minimum Viable Product Shipped

WP Curve doesn’t have an admin and ticket tracking system currently in place. They could probably build it, and maybe they are, but that might distract them from growing their customer base first.

Right now they’re using email and Olark chat to solve issues. While I would prefer an admin area and ticket tracking showing the progress of tasks, that’s not the most important thing.

The most important thing is that my projects are completed fast, accurately, and safely. The second most important thing is that I have the flexibility to get more projects completed through them, which I do. Just as important as the last two is that the price is right – and it is.

The three above items get me 85% of the way there. They could have spent extra time building an admin and ticketing system, but email and chat is working just fine for now.

The business lesson here is straight out of The Lean Startup:

“The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.” ― Eric Ries

5. Under-promise, Over-deliver

I’m not 100% convinced that this is a hard and fast business rule. If you don’t explain your service well enough, you might be losing out on customers. In the case of WP Curve however, their first day they provided a quick site audit with a list of recommended fixes. I noticed now that they have a line on their home page about providing this, but I didn’t realize this and was pleasantly surprised when I got the list within 24 hours.

They said on their home page that most jobs are fixed within 6 hours. My first urgent hacked site project was fixed within 7 minutes. That’s an over-delivery when I was in the most pain.

Improvements

No company is perfect, and there’s always room for improvement, and I’m sure the founders at WP Curve have a whole list of innovations they’re working on. There are a few that stood out to me:

As mentioned earlier, the admin and ticketing system isn’t a deal breaker for me or for most people I’m sure, but it was one thing I’m surprised they didn’t have. For customers that are taking advantage of their promise of unlimited tasks, this could be a big one.

I didn’t notice their line about proactively sending a list of things to fix. I think for small business owners that are not developers, this would be a big selling point. They should consider making that a prominent feature and saying something like “We give you new ideas every month to make your site better.” With phrasing like this, it makes them feel like a part time employee of mine.

I’m not sure if the economics would work out for them, but I would love to see a 3 or 5 site monthly package at a discounted rate. I would think it’s safe to say that I might have one site that would need more work than the average every month, but three sites that need less than the average. Like the insurance industry they could offer a discount if they’re spreading the risk.

I’ve only been a subscriber for a short period of time, but I’m very happy with WP Curve and have unexpectedly learned a few business principles that I hope to apply well to future projects.

New Recommendation: WP Buffs

I’ve only been using WP Buffs for a few months, but I’m loving their service so far. They have a hybrid US/international support team that responds super fast and is ready to help.

They’ve fixed several pesky issues for me so far that would have taken precious time out of my day to fix. They aren’t necessarily a replacement for a dedicated developer, and they have restrictions on what they’ll do, but if you’re looking for quick fixes for small issues, they’re the way to go.

I’m on the $120/month Perform Pro plan and I highly recommend any one of these plans depending on your situation:

It’s tough to find great WordPress maintenance help that won’t be sub-par or cost an arm and a leg. I highly recommend WP Buffs as of 2018!

]]>https://www.greenflagdigital.com/wp-curve-wp-premium-support-godaddy-review/feed/2Homepage SEO Best Practices (with 16 Examples)https://www.greenflagdigital.com/homepage-seo/
https://www.greenflagdigital.com/homepage-seo/#respondMon, 03 Apr 2017 16:14:14 +0000https://www.greenflagdigital.com/?p=1581A client recently asked me if they needed to apply the same SEO principles to their homepage as they do for other key pages on their site. Is homepage SEO a thing, or can it be safely ignored? On the one hand, your homepage is the page on your site that likely gets the most […]

]]>A client recently asked me if they needed to apply the same SEO principles to their homepage as they do for other key pages on their site.

Is homepage SEO a thing, or can it be safely ignored?

On the one hand, your homepage is the page on your site that likely gets the most backlinks, and is therefore the most powerful. So theoretically it should be the easiest to rank keywords for.

On the other hand, homepages tend to be like Yahoo!’s portal: unfocused pages where everything is thrown together.

Thankfully there are tools that can show us what the some of the top companies that get SEO are doing with they’re homepage. We can look to them for guidance on how to set up. We’ll look at three different sectors to get a feel and see what’s working: ecommerce, travel, and SaaS.

Homepage SEO Best Practices

You’d think that being the one page on your site that most likely gets the most links that you should target your highest value, head terms on the homepage right?

Not exactly.

If you’re simply putting your most valuable keyword on the homepage because you don’t know where else to put it, you’re not guaranteed to rank.

We’re going to look at a bunch of examples in a second, but let’s look at the savage beast that is Amazon:

Amazon has 3.28 billion backlinks, from almost 3 million domains.

Their most linked-to page by far is the home page:

But if we look at their top keywords and exclude the brand name of “Amazon”, you’ll see their top keywords are all going to individual pages.

This is because while the homepage gets the most backlinks by far, the fact that it’s unfocused and constantly changing means that it’s not a good candidate to rank for non-brand keywords.

I’ll admit that the fact that “yahoo mail” and “mapquest” are their two top non-brand keywords is just strange, but it still proves our point.

Amazon is a weird example, so we’ll get more specific examples in a bit below.

In general, what is homepage SEO and what are the best practices?

Michiel Heijmans of Yoast has a good definition of what homepage SEO actually is:

“The process of optimizing your homepage for Google, or any other search engines, could be called homepage SEO. Let me make a bold statement right after naming it: I don’t think that homepage SEO exists (as such). That might not be what a webmaster wants to hear, especially if he has been trying to rank his homepage for years.”

I would mostly agree with Michiel that homepage SEO shouldn’t be the main focus, but it shouldn’t be ignored.

Some General Homepage SEO Best Practices

Get the basics down for optimizing your homepage, ensure it loads fast, has crawlable text outside of images, has semantic markup, and content on the page

Use it as a lauchpad for the rest of your site, what this means for SEO is using the authority of the page to point internal links to the key internal pages of your site

Highlight core features of your product, and use it as an opportunity to rank for certain long-tail or experimental keywords

Don’t expect to rank for your most important keywords on the homepage, this isn’t the place for that. We’ll be focusing a lot on this aspect below.

The whole takeaway of this article is this: brands will optimize their homepages for certain keywords for two reasons.

Some will attempt to rank very important keywords on the homepage. But it’s futile because it’s just not going to work.

The others will simply be using the homepage title tag as a place to include brand messaging. They’re telling the viewer that this is what they’re about, this is what they’re selling, they’re not attempting to actually rank the homepage for that keyword.

SEO, in theory, is not good enough, let’s look at examples in three different industries.

Ecommerce Homepage SEO

Ecommerce sites love images. They loooooove putting them everywhere, which is great. It’s what the people want.

As a perfect example, here’s an example of Nike doing literally zero attempts at any homepage SEO:

Just one huge image, and a newsletter signup form. Great for CRO, not going to do much for SEO, but that may be ok, as we’ll learn.

Ecommerce sites focus on beautiful images first above all else because that’s what the users want. As customers, we want to see and learn about the product as much as possible before we commit to the purchase.

The downside of the image first thinking of many ecommerce sites is that text becomes an afterthought. It’s more than secondary in the eyes of ecommerce site managers – it’s a burden.

Ecommerce homepages are usually plastered with images, and there’s very little in the way of any sort of descriptive text content.

Let’s look at a few examples and then address this challenge after.

Example 1: “laptops”

Search Volume: 2,240,000

CPC: $0.94

Keyword Difficulty: 47

One of the top keywords in the world, “laptops” is extremely popular, yet vague at the same time. I looked through a few of the top laptop brands and resellers, and only two stood out as optimizing their homepage for laptops, HP and Newegg.

This is what their search results look like:

HP

Newegg

So these two brands are actively optimizing their homepage for laptops. The thing is, when you actually go to search for laptops, you’re not getting homepages ranking, you’re getting this:

There are no homepages ranking on page 1 for “laptops”, they’re all category pages. What this illustrates is that be HP and Newegg optimizing their homepage for laptops, they’re not doing much to help. Here we see for both brand that their internal category pages are the ones ranking.

The reason those are ranking is because those are the most accurate landing pages that will satisfy the visitor’s search query. People searching for “laptops” don’t want to land on a generic homepage also offering cameras, drones, and keyboards. They want to save the click.

Example 2: “bedding”

Search Volume: 165,000

CPC: $1.32

Keyword Difficulty: 37

This keyword is another example of a “head term” keyword, tons of search volume and a one to two-word query. Again I searched through all the top brands, and found only Overstock and Bed Bath & Beyond optimizing their homepages for “bedding”.

Overstock

Bed Bath & Beyond

It’s great that these brands are optimizing for bedding. The thing is, I’m pretty sure they have some very smart SEOs working for them that know their homepage is never going to rank for “bedding”.

The honors go to these landing pages:

Not one homepage among the whole bunch. These are all category pages. The reason the category pages rank is for two reasons:

Since “bedding” is such a vague keyword, the user is best served by a collection of products rather than an individual product page or general home page.

By default, the bedding category pages are both intentionally and naturally optimized for the keyword “bedding” more so than any other page.

The lesson here is that for any keyword you want to rank, you have to see what’s already ranking in the search results. That will tell you what page type the users want to see. Go make that happen

Ecommerce Homepage SEO Tips

There’s a strong temptation to only copy what competitors and larger brands are doing. You definitely want to analyze them and learn from them, but don’t blindly follow. Standards are constantly evolving and changing. Just as you shouldn’t copy Amazon because you’re not Amazon, you shouldn’t blindly follow other brands to the ‘t’ and assume they have all the right answers.

Here are some tips for ecommerce homepage SEO that will make you shine:

Follow the ecommerce industry standards in showcasing big beautiful images, but never include text hidden in the images, text should be text, styled to look good

Put the user first always, don’t do things just for SEO or just for some other reason, you’ll find that SEO and design and UX best practices can line up for the user and be beneficial

When you have sections on the home page, use descriptive text as a benefit, to explain the section

Along those lines, don’t see content and descriptive text as a burden that “the SEO guy wants”, but as beneficial for the user

If you have new products you’re working to get visibility and traffic to, feature them on the homepage, this will also help with internal linking and indexing

Travel Homepage SEO

The travel industry vitally needs organic traffic to thrive, but the specifics of it depend on what part of the travel industry we’re talking about.

Large tour operators and tour marketplaces – such as Viator, Contiki, Zicasso

Travel review sites – such as Tripadvisor and Oyster

So each of these sub-categories has their nuances, but let’s look at a few examples.

Example 1: “cheap flights”

Search Volume: 6,120,000

CPC: $1.43

Keyword Difficulty: 75

For those that don’t automatically use Kayak or Google Flights, the keyword “cheap flights” is one of the most searched commercial keywords in the world.

Ranking #1 for this would give you approximately $2,187,900 in traffic value if you were to pay for this with Google AdWords. This is assuming a ballpark 25% click-through-rate for ranking #1.

Let’s take a look at what major brand are optimizing their home pages for “cheap flights”. We can generally assume if it’s in the precious real estate of the title tag, that it’s being optimized for that page.

Expedia

Skyscanner

Hipmunk

All three of these sites are slightly different variations of travel search engines, and all three are optimizing their homepage for “cheap flights”.

Despite this, none of these homepages are ranking in the SERPs for “cheap flights”.

Instead, we get this:

All of the ranking pages are specific flights pages, except for the actual brand CheapFlights.com. (EMDs still work)

So why do these brands even bother including the keyword in their homepage title? We’ll get to that in a bit.

Example 2: “cruise deals”

Search Volume: 246,000

CPC: $2.22

Keyword Difficulty: 40

“Cruise deals” is another transportation deal travel keyword and another heavy hitter. Ranking #1 for this keyword would bring in $136,530 worth of traffic value per month. For the right company ranking for that keyword, the actual value to the company could be ten-fold.

We see major cruise lines optimizing their homepages for this keyword:

Norwegian Cruise Line

Carnival

Holland America

Yet once again, when it comes to the pages that are actually ranking for “cruise deals”, it’s none of these home pages:

Carnival surely has that #1 ranking, but it’s not the home page – it’s their dedicated Cruise Deals page, which is the best fit for the user in the end.

So what’s the reason for these travel companies to bother optimizing their title tag for keywords at all if there’s no chance these pages are going to rank?

Branding & messaging.

If the smart marketers at these companies know what they’re doing, they know that their homepages aren’t actually going to rank for these keywords. They know that the dedicated landing pages for those keywords are the pages that will rank.

What the marketing and SEO bosses at these companies are doing is controlling the messaging around their brand. When people type “Carnival cruises” into Google, they want to entice users to click on Carnival’s listing and not some third party that will end up taking a commission.

Travel Homepage SEO Tips

Despite the fact that you shouldn’t bank on your homepage ranking for your valuable non-brand keywords, here are some top tips to keep in mind for your travel homepage SEO checklist:

Feature your seasonal travel products to help push internal links to those pages

Include a bit of text content describing your travel company in general

You don’t need to go overboard on optimization as you might for your internal pages

Use as an opportunity to push internal links to the “money” pages of your site

Good testing ground for personalization and A/B testing

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Homepage SEO

I’ve saved one of the best for last, as I’m a huge consumer of SaaS products. I’m subscribed to at least ten of them, and I know there are many other digital marketers subscribed to dozens and dozens.

So as a long-time consumer of these services, I feel my perspective on SaaS SEO is valid.

Example 1: “crm software”

Search Volume: 74,000

CPC: $25.77

Keyword Difficulty: 69

The keyword “crm software” (customer relationship management software) is a beast. A solid 74,000 searches a month with a mind-blowing $25.77 cost-per-click. Ranking #1 would bring in $476,745 worth of search traffic. Per month.

That shows both how valuable they keyword is and how insane their profit margins must be. Or how much VC money they’re burning trying to get each extra customer.

I was surprised to see the heavy hitters such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho not including “CRM” in their homepage at all. Perhaps they’re fairly advanced in the organic search realm and know that including the keyword in their homepage doesn’t line up with their goals. Maybe.

Infusionsoft and Pipedrive are both optimizing their homepages for the term:

Infusionsoft

Pipedrive

You know the drill, once again we see no homepages ranking for the keyword:

The most interesting thing here compared to our past examples is the absence of any CRM software companies in the first few results, we see a definition site and two review sites that dominate the organic area above the fold.

This is once again an example of Google providing what its users want (ignore the paid ads that are opposite J) instead of what the companies want.

Example 2: “email marketing software”

Search Volume: 8,100

CPC: $13.63

Keyword Difficulty: 60

Another nasty lucrative keyword, email marketing software providers are making like 90% margin on us hard-working marketers.

Ranking #1 for a keyword like this would be worth about $27,600 in search traffic. Not as huge as some of the other keywords, but this one is more niche. The term “email marketing” gets 74,000 searches and similar CPCs. So we’ve got some funny money stakes here.

Let’s look at who’s doing what:

Constant Contact

GetResponse

MailChimp

Not an exact match optimization, but pretty close.

So let’s look at the results:

So for the first time today, we actually see a homepage ranking! The formidable MailChimp in all its glory is ranking at #5 with its homepage. That means after the user gets past the pesky ads and gets distracted by the answer box, that about 5% or less of people will click on the MailChimp result.

SaaS Homepage SEO Tips

To be blunt, marketers at SaaS companies just tend to be more advanced and savvy than other verticals, so I’m not surprised to see them implementing best practices better than other industries. That being said, here are some thoughts on how best to optimize a SaaS homepage:

Use the homepage as a beautiful sales or feature page, talk to your users and explain the features. MailChimp does a beautiful job at this, and so does HubSpot

MailChimp:

HubSpot:

This is more experimental, but you can totally include cutting-edge and high-growth features on your homepage if they’re not prominent to get a page of their own. They’ll most likely rank on the homepage if you plan it correctly, and then you can migrate to their own page after that

Use the homepage as a portal to your featured products and offerings. Use the power of the homepage to push internal links to new pages that you want to focus and get ranking fast.

What to do Next

The reality is that each and every keyword is its own strategy. Google has been around for almost twenty years and has perfected search result user experience. They’re going to show searchers what they’re looking for as best they can.

What that means is that you can’t force feed your chosen page into the SERPs. You have to look at what’s ranking to understand the user intent, and then create a page that satisfies that query even more.

Homepage SEO is complicated. All of the results we looked at today more or less show that homepage SEO doesn’t truly work for important keywords. At the same time, if you’re a decent human being you’ll follow some of the best practices to give your homepage a fighting chance for what it’s good for.

I would love your feedback! How do you optimize your homepage SEO? What is your perspective? Did this provide clarity or confusion?

]]>https://www.greenflagdigital.com/homepage-seo/feed/0How to Growth Hack Link Building with Infographicshttps://www.greenflagdigital.com/how-to-growth-hack-link-building-with-infographics/
https://www.greenflagdigital.com/how-to-growth-hack-link-building-with-infographics/#commentsTue, 11 Oct 2016 21:44:11 +0000http://www.greenflagdigital.com/?p=1380Infographics are everywhere on the web and cover every topic imaginable. Done well, an infographic turns boring data into something visually attractive and intellectually digestible. But considering how labor intensive it can be to create a quality infographic, many marketing professionals question if they are an outdated tactic. Is infographic for SEO promotion and link […]

]]>Infographics are everywhere on the web and cover every topic imaginable. Done well, an infographic turns boring data into something visually attractive and intellectually digestible. But considering how labor intensive it can be to create a quality infographic, many marketing professionals question if they are an outdated tactic. Is infographic for SEO promotion and link building worth your time? Let’s take a look why it is.

Sure, infographics take a lot more planning and drafting hours than a blog post. But once completed, an infographic is a ready-made and highly shareable piece of content that is uniquely effective in building backlinks. If you are willing to put in the time to both design and promote an infographic properly, the return you will get in your search engine rankings will be well worth the effort.

So you have your infographic, it’s beautiful and informative and ready to make its debut on the world wide web! Now you need to spread the word and start building links. An infographic outreach campaign can be broken down into three simple steps:

Amass large lists of relevant domains with active blogs – To what kinds of businesses and communities is your infographic relevant? What kind of readers would be interested in your content? Categorize your domains according to subject matter and audience – in doing so, you’ll be able to quickly draft email templates specific to each category, but broad enough that you’re not laboring over each and every pitch. Alternatively, you can identify popular accounts on Twitter that tweet about your subject using Followerwonk or other social media analysis tools.

Identify a contact for each domain – Who writes for this blog? If multiple people do, which writer publishes content most similar to your infographic? If you are unable to find any author bylines on the blog, can you figure out who is in charge of content marketing?

Send each contact an email – They need to keep their content wheel churning, and you have something that is relevant to their audience. Blogging consistently is hugely important, but also incredibly difficult. Many bloggers struggle to post regularly, and so sharing content can actually be a great help. In return for supplying a blogger with great subject matter for a blog post, you get a link in return.

Each and every link builds momentum in your campaign, gets more eyeballs on your content, and passes on some of that sweet, sweet link juice. After you have secured a few great placements, you may even begin to notice that your infographic has obtained some unsolicited backlinks. That is the beauty of viral sharing!

Finding active blogs and writers to feature your content can take a lot of time, so you want to move quickly and methodically. Here are three groups of bloggers and domains that you should not overlook when building your contact list, tips on how to hunt down their contact information, and suggestions for crafting a compelling pitch:

Link Building with Freelance Writers

Freelancers make great contacts in link building, especially ones that write within the same niche as the subject of your infographic. A freelancer who writes for multiple clients may even be able to spin your infographic to use on more than one site.

Find contact info

Often freelancers do not have an email address specific to the domain you are trying to get a link on, so scouring the site’s contact page or emailing a generic info@ address may not do much good. However a writer may have their own website where they display their portfolio and resume. A quick Google search can help you pull up their personal domain where their contact info should be easy to find.

Lucky for you, most freelancers actually want their contact info to be readily available!

If there is no contact info on their website, or if they do not have their own website, a writer’s Twitter is a great place to search. Allmytweets.net will amass a text version of everything a user has ever tweeted, making it easy for you to Ctrl+F. Maybe they’ve tweeted their contact information before.

Once you have a text version of a writer’s tweets, Ctrl + F to search for words like “mail.” I found this freelancer’s email address very quickly using this method.

Get off topic…

Getting contact info is just the beginning. A writer’s personal website or social media profile is a goldmine of personal info you can use to craft a compelling introduction for your infographic. As in real-life social settings, hobbies, interests, and shared experiences are more natural starting points for conversation than work. Keeping this in mind, add just a touch of friendly fodder for conversation to your pitches. You will come across as a more well-rounded human being than if you were to dive right into business immediately after introducing yourself.

Looking at a freelance writer’s portfolio and self-summary can give you a feel for what they really love to write about. Maybe the writer is a crafter by passion but writes for tech blogs to pay the bills. Even if you are trying to get a link on their tech client’s website, briefly complimenting a recent piece they wrote on crocheting will help win them over. Writers want to be read, not used for links. A little effort to demonstrate that you’ve read their work is a small gesture that goes a long way.

As little as two friendly, personalized sentences can make all of the difference.

…but don’t get carried away.

Of course nobody likes to be baited and switched, so the clear intention of your email should always be the infographic you want them to share. It is definitely not recommended that you email a writer to ask them about their hobbies only to segue to your infographic after you have already exchanged several emails.

You should also be genuine. Don’t talk about how much you love their blog if secretly you’ve never read it and don’t care about the subject. You should always aim for truth or at least truthiness, to borrow a term from Colbert.

Furthermore, you do not need to spend a ton of time crafting completely personalized pitches for every writer. Gush at length about their interests and portfolio and you risk coming off disingenuous or creepy. Besides, you should be casting your net wide and sending a ton of these emails, so don’t let any one pitch take up too much of your time. Your general outreach template plus a few recipient-specific touches should do the trick. Here are some examples:

You found their personal blog: “I adored your post about your travels in Italy. I visited Rome several years ago and your piece brought back so many great memories. You’ve got me wanting to book another trip!”

You found their CV: “I used to follow your posts on [Old Employer’s] blog when I was working in that field. I don’t know how long you’ve been writing for [Current Employer], but congrats on the new gig!”

You found their Twitter: “As a side note, the observations you tweeted about [issue/event] were spot on. I completely agree and was so happy to read something that articulated my thoughts on the subject so well.”

Link Building with Startups

In a highly competitive environment bent on growth, startups need to prioritize marketing. And essential to any modern marketing strategy is content. Startups are highly receptive to the viral nature of sharing that has made infographics such a useful content strategy, and many are hungry to establish themselves as thought leaders in their respective fields. Feed them a great pitch and your infographic is prime content for their blogs and social media.

Finding contact info

A benefit of reaching out to early stage startups is that such companies are unlikely to have a huge number of employees. This makes it easy for you to figure out in whose inbox you want your pitch to land. If there are no author bylines on the blog, the “Our Team” page of the company’s website is a good place to try to narrow down your target based on title.

There are countless free and paid tools to help you find email addresses by domain — I personally like Email Hunter, a Chrome plugin that will scan up to 150 domains per month free of charge. Plugins are a nice way to cut down on the amount of open tabs in your browser, saving you from the distracting hassle of constantly navigating away and back again in your search for contact info. But if you are unable to locate the email address of your desired contact, try making an educated guess. Most companies use the same formula for each employee’s email handle. If you know one address, you can probably guess them all, provided you know the names of those who you are trying to reach.

Email Hunter’s Chrome plugin will save you tons of time and make your guesswork easy.

Not getting any hits for email addresses at all? Before you give up and fill out a contact form, quickly search Google to see if the company has any press releases on the wire. Many press releases include an email address in the heading or footer.

(Click to enlarge) Most press releases include contact info, so search here if you’re stumped.

Make it easy

It’s almost a cliche to point out that employees of startups, especially early-stage ones, often wear many hats. It is likely that an employee writing for the company blog has countless other priorities they need to make time for on any given work day. A well designed and relevant infographic is an ideal, ready-made piece of content for someone who is pressed for time. The only writing they have to do is a brief introductory paragraph. And if they are too busy to manage that, you can always offer to write it for them. Besides, ghost writing an intro paragraph for your infographic is an excellent way to exercise some control over the anchor text and keywords associated with your backlink.

Link Building Locally

In your pursuit to spread links to your infographic far and wide, you would be remiss to overlook folks in your own area. Everyone loves local businesses; local businesses love other (non-competing) local businesses. You’re a local, so you know their clients and customers. You may even be one of their customers. You already have something in common, so reaching out is less of a cold call from a stranger and more of a neighborly hello.

Conversion > traffic

Small businesses and agencies do not often have strong domain authority, and their blogs might not have a large readership. But a neighboring business’s website is likely filled with local-specific keywords that you would be right to take advantage of. Localized search terms may not drive as much traffic as universal ones, but the conversion rates more than make up for that gap. Local leads are always going to be warmer.

Relevancy is also a key term to remember when it comes to SEO. You want links from related websites to yours. That may mean sites in your same industry, or it may mean geographically relevant sites, depending on your audience. Relevant links are more important than random links from random websites, because it shows trust and authority.

Get to know your neighbors

Even if local outreach results in just a few placements for your infographic, there is plenty benefit to be had in the simple act of introducing yourself to business owners in your area. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of word-of-mouth and local recognition for any business. Whether they link to you or not, connecting with them could lead to partnerships, referrals, exchanges of services, and so much more.

Other Tips

Following up with folks who you have not heard back from should be as much of a priority as finding new targets to pitch. Follow up with everyone who does not reply after a week or two. Maybe your second email reaches them at a better time, or maybe they just forgot. You may be surprised how many more responses you receive the second time around.

Emailing the wrong person can sometimes work out in your favor. Send a pitch to the Sales Director but format it for the Copy Editor, and the Sales Director may not feel comfortable deleting mail intended for a coworker. Misaddressed emails are so common in office environments that it is general etiquette to always forward these emails to the intended recipient, where your message is more likely to be read than if it were coming directly from a stranger. This trick can come in handy if you are unable to locate the email address of your specific target.

Strike a balance between time spent personalizing your pitches, and time spent finding new contacts. You want to give each email enough attention that you sound like a real person, but don’t labor over individual emails. That time is better spent amassing new contacts. Try writing out a template specific to each category of domains, leaving room in each template for just one or two lines of customization. For example, if your infographic is about cyber security, you may have identified companies that sell security software as one group of targets and internet privacy blogs as another. Write one template for the software companies and another template for the privacy blogs. The goals and readerships of these types of blogs are different, and your pitches should reflect that.

Conclusion

If you don’t have experience with producing and pitching an infographic, I agree that reaching out to strangers in droves can be a bit intimidating at first. But with even a single outreach campaign under your belt, you may just find yourself hooked. Getting into your rhythm happens faster than you’d expect, and link building can actually be pretty rewarding once you get into the swing of things.

Link building with infographics is equal parts managing time and expectations. Don’t expect the majority of your infographics to go viral, since most don’t. But with the right preparation, planning, and promotion, you’ll have a strong strategy for acquiring links and publicity in a highly scalable way. You just have to start with the first one!

]]>https://www.greenflagdigital.com/how-to-growth-hack-link-building-with-infographics/feed/15 Ways to Boost Your Ecommerce SEO with Internal Linkshttps://www.greenflagdigital.com/ecommerce-seo-internal-links/
https://www.greenflagdigital.com/ecommerce-seo-internal-links/#respondThu, 25 Aug 2016 01:05:40 +0000http://www.greenflagdigital.com/?p=1358In the realm of SEO, we often obsess over two things: Great content and authoritative backlinks. We can get caught up chasing more and more links and doing more and more content promotion, while opportunities are right under our nose. There’s a whole world of on-site optimization ripe for the picking – if you’re the […]

We can get caught up chasing more and more links and doing more and more content promotion, while opportunities are right under our nose.

There’s a whole world of on-site optimization ripe for the picking – if you’re the right type of ecommerce website.

See, if you’re a really small site you do want to focus on content production and getting publicity and backlinks as much as you can. It’s only when you start to grow bigger that you need to really focus on on-site optimization.

See how they provide guides and tools beyond just a listing of products?

When it comes to internal linking from blog posts, take the same approach as you did for your product pages.

Build a blog post around that entire category and make it captivating. Think about how that category of products fits into your brand. Describe why this category of products is worth paying attention to.

Describe your audience’s problems and provide a solution.

Don’t forget to link.

4. Add Content to Category pages and link horizontally

As described earlier, your category pages are often lifeless. And sad.

Let’s change that.

When you’re busy transforming your category pages to a destination, don’t forget to link internally to other pages.

Amazon does a great job of integrating different sections of their site into their category pages:

Think about any pages on your site that can be useful to someone visiting this category page:

Blog posts

Other category pages

Specific products not in this category

Products in this category

Internal guides and resources

Don’t be afraid to link liberally, as long as it provides value to the user.

5. Use Curated User Pages for Internal Links

User-generated content: the holy grail of SEO.

Why do all the work yourself?

You should leverage your fans and followers to build out curated pages on your website. Pages that include their favorite products. Blog posts written by super-fans. Wishlists to share with their lovers.

This is an advanced tactic: you’re not going to be able to do this on day one.

It works – this user has almost 40,000 followers. And she’s just one fashionista.

A search shows 21 million pages on their site, many of those created by users:

Forward thinking ecommerce companies use user-generated content to their advantage.

Not only are the companies getting free content creation, but internal links are being created in the process.

An entire network of pages are linked like a spider web. This is good for the user experience, and great for SEO.

It’s an advanced tactic, but if you can get enough brand loyalty, user-generated content and links will do wonders.

Conclusion

Listen, manually adding internal links is boring.

If you’re an owner or executive of your ecommerce store, you don’t want to be spending your time changing HTML tags.

That doesn’t discount its importance, however.

For the right ecommerce store, a focus on internal links can give your website a huge boost. Make sure you’re taking care of the low-hanging fruit in your SEO project this year, there are definitely some opportunities.

]]>https://www.greenflagdigital.com/ecommerce-seo-internal-links/feed/017 Best Places to Learn Inbound Marketinghttps://www.greenflagdigital.com/17-best-places-to-learn-inbound-marketing/
https://www.greenflagdigital.com/17-best-places-to-learn-inbound-marketing/#respondMon, 15 Aug 2016 21:07:21 +0000http://www.greenflagdigital.com/?p=1339The percentage of businesses doing content marketing is staggering: 88% of B2B companies use content marketing, which is highly integrated with inbound marketing. But where do you begin if you’re new to inbound marketing? Where do you start? Who do you contact? Is there an app for that? How do you just go out and […]

]]>The percentage of businesses doing content marketing is staggering: 88% of B2B companies use content marketing, which is highly integrated with inbound marketing.

But where do you begin if you’re new to inbound marketing?

Where do you start? Who do you contact? Is there an app for that? How do you just go out and learn inbound marketing? Unfortunately, the scope of inbound marketing is far too vast for any one source to give you all the information you need, so to help you out, we’ve compiled a list of our seventeen favorite inbound marketing resources.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Before you can learn the ins and outs of inbound marketing, you first have to understand what all this strategy entails. Simply put, inbound marketing is “creating and publishing content over a broad range of platforms that will help drive traffic to your business, helping you to attract, convert, and delight new customers.”

So what does that mean exactly? It means that, instead of posting ads everywhere in hopes that potential clients will see it, you instead create content that people will be interested in that will lead them to you. No longer will you be chasing down leads, now your customer base will be “inbound”. As we mentioned, this topic is far too broad to cover in a single place, so here are the top seventeen sites that can help you get the most out of your inbound marketing strategy.

HubSpot practically coined the phrase “inbound marketing”. Started way back in 2004, the founders of HubSpot have one goal in mind: to help companies achieve the best, most organic marketing possible. If you want to find out the foundations of inbound marketing, this is the place to go.

Their free inbound marketing certification program is probably the best place to start before you do anything else inbound related. They’ve absolutely mastered inbound marketing themselves, so you should follow what they say and how they do it. Don’t be surprised when they start reaching out to you after your “lead score” is high enough.

I always recommend Moz as the first place to go to learn about SEO, but they’ve expanded well beyond SEO to include content, UX, analytics, social media, and so much more.

One of the best ways to increase brand awareness is through Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO. If you’re still struggling with getting your content optimized, then the good folks down at Moz can help you get started. The site has dozens of articles and how-tos that can help you make the most of your content and improve your SEO in a white-hat way.

If you’re completely new to the idea of inbound marketing, then it can be quite a daunting task to take it on all at once. One of the best places to get started, however, is Inbound.org. This site was actually created by the founders of HubSpot and Moz, so you know that the site has some brains backing it’s direction. Inbound.org is one of the premier destinations for all things related to inbound marketing, so if you have any questions at all, this is a great place to find an answer.

It’s one of the best ways to check in on the latest trending inbound and content marketing topics without trolling through dozens of sites on your own.

One of the most important parts of inbound marketing is to create proprietary content that will attract customers. If you’re new to the concept of content marketing, then this is a fantastic place to learn the ins and outs of the whole process, from understanding what content your customers will want, to knowing how best to tie that content into your overall marketing strategy.

If you still need some extra pointers on content creation and curation, then the Content Strategist is another excellent place to go for information. This site is the official blog of the New York company Contently, so you will get real-world advice from people who know what works and what doesn’t.

If your company is mature enough, you will have a team of dedicated copywriters or bloggers who manage your content for you. However, finding the right talent can be tricky, especially if they are remote workers. To help your team improve its skills, Copyblogger is a perfect site that provides advice and even certifications for any content creator on your marketing team.

Social media is already at the core of modern marketing strategies, and inbound marketing relies on using social media as a promotion and amplification channel. One of the best sites to get advice and find out more about incorporating social media into your marketing strategy is Buffer. This blog specializes in how to scale your marketing outreach as well as how to really connect with your customer base.

If you want inspiration on how to do content really well, take a look at everything they’ve written and shared.

In marketing lingo, when you convert someone that means that you have successfully transitioned a visitor into a reliable customer. Conversion rates are a fantastic way to identify what parts of your marketing are working and what aspects are lagging. To help ensure that you become more successful (via higher conversion rates), the blog Convince and Convert can give you the tools and the advice to reach your marketing goals.

One of the biggest problems with social media is managing all of your different accounts and profiles. Even if you just stick with the major three (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) that can still be a full-time job. Thankfully, the good folks down at Hootsuite are all about social media management and can help you become much more efficient at maintaining a constant presence across all social media platforms.

Their Hootesuite Academy is a great resource for learning social media and other digital marketing skills.

Another aspect of social media that can be difficult to manage is the speed with which information travels. These days, you have to stay on top of current trends and avoid any embarrassing gaffes that could occur. For example, DiGiorno pizza tried to latch onto a trending hashtag (#whyistayed) by remarking that pizza was the reason. Unfortunately, the hashtag was relating to domestic violence, so it came off as extremely distasteful. Social Media Examiner is a great source for learning about social media best practices and how to avoid such blunders.

As we mentioned above, conversion rates are huge with regards to how successful your marketing strategy is. If you need further advice and help with increasing your conversion rates, then Conversioner is the place to go. This site also specializes in helping you create emotionally satisfying content that will deepen the bond between you and your customers.

While Copyblogger is a fantastic site to help your content writing team develop its skills, Copyhackers is the next step in ensuring that your landing pages and ad copy are successful in driving business to you, as well as increasing conversion rates. Simply put, Copyblogger sets it up, and Copyhackers closes the deal.

One of the most reliable methods of inbound marketing is email marketing. However, this process is not as simple as it may seem at first. Thus, if you’re new to the email game or just want to help make your campaign more successful, then check out AWeber. This blog is perfect for beginners and intermediates who want to fine-tune and create exceptional email marketing campaigns.

Just as Social Media Examiner helps you identify and execute best practices on social media, so does Chief Marketing Technology with c-suite marketing technology. This blog will help you to ensure that your next campaign is both successful as well as natural and organic.

The site’s audience is chief marketing technologists – or those that aspire to be one.

To have the best results from an email marketing campaign, you first have to create email content that will engage your readers. To help out, Email Design Review will give you the tools you need to create a stellar email design that will hook readers and help get you repeat business.

One of the best resources you can have is experience. Unfortunately, if you’re just starting with inbound marketing and email in particular, then you don’t have years of experience to draw on. Fortunately, at Email Monday, Jordan Van Rijin has over thirteen years of experience generating successful email campaigns, so you can use his expertise to craft a truly remarkable campaign.

Although we’d like to tell you that this is a comprehensive list of the best places to learn inbound marketing, the truth is that there are dozens of different sites out there that can help you with all facets of your marketing portfolio. The best inbound marketing strategy doesn’t stick to just one thing; you have to adapt to a variety of platforms so you can reach the widest audience possible. Nonetheless, hopefully, this list will get you on the road to making your next marketing move a successful one. Happy inbounding!

]]>https://www.greenflagdigital.com/17-best-places-to-learn-inbound-marketing/feed/0How Should a Business Do Lean Content Marketing?https://www.greenflagdigital.com/lean-content-marketing/
https://www.greenflagdigital.com/lean-content-marketing/#respondThu, 31 Mar 2016 01:05:32 +0000http://www.greenflagdigital.com/?p=1164In working with small companies of 10-30 employees I’ve realized the need for solidifying a lean content team. My theory is that you only need three roles to make up a great lean content team for a small to medium-sized company. Every company should have a dedicated director of marketing. If it’s a tiny, tiny […]

]]>In working with small companies of 10-30 employees I’ve realized the need for solidifying a lean content team. My theory is that you only need three roles to make up a great lean content team for a small to medium-sized company.

Every company should have a dedicated director of marketing. If it’s a tiny, tiny company the CEO might fill this role, but I think it’s a mistake to not have a dedicated person separate. If your company is bringing in at least $500k a year in revenue, you should be able to afford a dedicated director of marketing.
The CEO needs to have someone they can talk to who can then manage the rest of the marketing process. A CEO doesn’t have time to manage the email marketer, SEO specialist, paid search specialist, designer, content writer, inbound marketer, social media person, etc. If they hire out contractors for all of those who work a limited amount of hours, there’s still a management overhead. So the CEO needs to designate a director of marketing to manage all of those, or contract out an entire marketing team with one agency. Managing the marketing process is a constant juggling match. The CEO can’t also be in charge of the sales team, production, talk to investors, run finance, and more and do it all properly.

Creating a Lean Content Team

The forgotten part of this trifecta is most often the writer. Copywriting is extremely important. With the explosion of content marketing, and general digital marketing, the writer is a core piece of this. But they are often forgotten. The writer should set the tone for the company communications, and work with the inbound marketer. The marketer should be doing some writing as well, but the main focus should be the overall strategy, and then execution on the individual channels, as well as analytics and reporting.

When creating excellent content in 2016, you’re not going to get very far without a designer on your team. You’ve got to be producing exceptional ebooks, longform blog posts, enticing social media images, and engaging emails. The designer works tightly with the marketer and writer in a tight feedback loop. Most often, the designer is not a writer and should not be tasked with writing content for their designs. Nor do they want to.

The marketer should be working on setting the strategy for the company, implementing that strategy, and testing different channels. They should be reporting on performance and working with the CEO on the budget and high level strategy. If using contractors or agencies, the buck stops with the marketer who should have the final approval and look-over.

I believe it’s a mistake to try to skimp on these three positions in a company. No matter what, if your company wants to grow, it needs to be spending “7 to 8 percent of your gross revenue for marketing and advertising if you’re doing less than $5 million a year in sales and your net profit margin — after all expenses — is in the 10 percent to 12 percent range”, according to Chron.com. However you want to decide on your marketing budget, make sure you choose a reliable method for making that decision and you’re not just deciding what you can afford after everything else is paid for.

Your two million a year in revenue business is not going to grow very fast with $2,000 a month dedicated to marketing. Your competitors will see your weakness and outspend and out-spend you.

To do their job well, your team members need to focus on what they’re good at. Any small business will require their employees to be juggling multiple roles, but the CEO needs to ensure these roles are filled properly as soon as they can afford it in order to compete in this content marketing obsessed world.